Building a custom Vagrant metadata server

Vagrant has long had a hosted service for boxes. 2014’s v1.5 release announcement contains the earliest reference I could find, and not long after in early 2015, I’d created a Ruby client in atlas-ruby (I don’t recall if it was originally publicly called Atlas at the time, or it was just the general domain which was being used and I named the gem accordingly). By 2017 this had fully become HashiCorp Vagrant Cloud, and now it’s part of their wider hosted products and called HCP Vagrant. But I’ve always wanted something so that I could host the boxes myself. After spelunking through some very 2010s-era Ruby, I figured out that it’s a lot simpler than I was expecting, although figuring out everything below took ages. We just have to override box_server_url in the Vagrantfile, like so: Vagrant.configure("2") do |config| config.vm.box = "nickcharlton/debian13" config.vm.box_server_url = "https://vms.example.com" end Vagrant will then try and fetch from that server URL instead of the public…